What can I do with pjjTextBase?

With the script you can manage a normalized database system! You can:

• select records from the database on any condition, even very complex
• count records that follow any given condition, even very complex
• sort table as you like (multiple columns, ASC/DESC)
• add, delete, modify records
• create new tables
• append records from other file
• append fields from other file
• find the maximum and minimum values in given field
• find all unique field values
• add and delete fields
• change field names

Normalized, you say?

Yes! You can not only put your data into one big table (which is trivial): you can actually normalize your database, designing a set of linked tables to avoid data redundancy – all these tables will be read into one array with just one line of code.

Let's suppose you have a file books.csv:

  id|@author|title|%translation
  1|1|Evil Under The Sun|1,2
  2|1|A Pocket Full of Rye|1,2,3
  3|2|A Study in Scarlet|2,3

and then two another, called author.csv:

  id|author
  1|Agatha Christie
  2|Arthur Conan Doyle
  3|Raymond Chandler

and translation.csv:

  id|translation
  1|French
  2|Spanish
  3|German

(I'm far from saying that eg. Evil Under The Sun wasn't translated into German; it's just an example, you know.)

All three files should have the same extension.–Mind the @ sign in the header of books.csv, as well as field and file name correspondence: @author, author.csv and author! Exactly the same applies to %translation field.

When books.csv is being connected to, linked file (author.csv) is being read as well, so eg. first record will have following fields:

  [id] -> 1
  [@author] -> 1 
  [title] -> Evil Under The Sun
  [author] -> Agatha Christie
  [%translation] -> 1,2

Linked table can have own link fields, too. For example you could modify the second table in such a way:

  id|author|@country
  1|Agatha Christie|1
  2|Arthur Conan Doyle|1
  3|Raymond Chandler|2

and add another file, called country.csv:

  id|country
  1|Great Britain
  2|USA

so the first record would look as follows:

  [id] -> 1
  [@author] -> 1 
  [title] -> Evil Under The Sun
  [author] -> Agatha Christie
  [@country] -> 1
  [country] -> Great Britain
  [%translation] -> 1,2

Now, how about %translation field? When books.csv was being connected to, translation.csv was read as well; I just didn't mention this above to explain iteration of connecting via link fields more clearly.

After connecting to all linked files, among them to translation.csv, first record looks this way:

  [id] -> 1
  [@author] -> 1 
  [title] -> Evil Under The Sun
  [author] -> Agatha Christie
  [@country] -> 1
  [country] -> Great Britain
  [%translation] -> 1,2
  [translation] -> Array:
    [0] -> French
    [1] -> Spanish

Let me remind that all this has been done with only one line of code:

  $books = ptb_connect('books.csv');

Now, isn't it great?–Naturally, if you have databases that are not connected via link or multi field, you need to connect to each of them separately.